Unilever has opened a twin-sited research centre it's calling the Centre for Excellence - Ice Foods to bring more innovation to ice cream, despite the fact it recently reported Magnum sales "soaring" in the good weather.

While consumer concerns have influenced the design of retail packaging to minimise waste and processing, the opposite has been the case in the supply chain.

The Co-operative recently introduced 17 new own-label fish lines on to its shelves for the summer season, including four premium products.

The magnificent men and their (hopefully) flying machines came in out in force to try and make as much air as possible with their homemade contraptions in the Red Bull Flugtag, held at London's Hyde Park recently.

The outlook is bleaker than ever for fresh produce businesses, according to a Plimsoll report. "Zero growth, sliding profits and escalating debts have pushed a third of the UK fresh produce industry to the brink of failure," it said. It is a picture of consolidation as supply outstrips demand and "companies are experiencing a difficult trade-off between protecting margins and appeasing price-sensitive customers". Plimsoll has rated 199 of the largest companies in the "need to change in order to survive" bracket. The company's David Pattison said they "must put immediate plans into place to trade their way out of the problems - cutting costs and jobs, and even turning unprofitable work away".

Waitrose has acquired four new shops in prime London locations from Woolworths, as part of its expansionist strategy this year.

Asda triumphed at The Grocer Gold Awards, stealing the availability award from last year's winner Morrisons, and once again bagging the pricing award.

British shoppers are leading their Continental counterparts when it comes to shopping ethically, according to new figures from the IGD.

It's the time of year when fruit and veg a-plenty are in season, but being something of a product of my generation I know strawberries are coming into season and potatoes are particularly new at the moment, but little more than that.

Model and health fanatic Nell McAndrew has been enlisted to provide the visual anchor for the Potato Council's Love Potatoes campaign, which is attempting to get consumers loving their indigenous spuds again.

A Tesco store in Bedfordshire reportedly refused to sell Jack Daniel's barbecue sauce to a 25-year-old customer who couldn't prove her age because it contained 2% alcohol. Sticklers for protocol, staff at the Flitwick store also allegedly refused to sell the bottle to her brother-in-law, who did have ID, because they believed he would just give the bottle to Miss Birchell. Tesco did admit there had been an "error of judgement".

Selling milk in bags could be a great way to reduce plastic bottles. Waitrose seems to think so, and has recently launched this innovation in stores. However, with a special - plastic - jug needed to house the bag, and a complex procedure to open it, will only the die-hard greenies buy into the idea? One unimpressed BBC tester was reported as saying he found milk "pouring from all directions" when he had a go.

4.2%There has a been a thaw in the frosty attitude of consumers to frozen food. TNS found that in the 52 weeks to 24 February, sales leaped 4.2% to £4.7bn, with not all of the increase down to price inflation. Fish and veg are doing particularly well.

Nelson's last order at the Battle of Trafalgar - "engage the enemy more closely" - has real echoes today. Recent POPAI research cast the shopper in the role of the enemy for some store managers as their queries "got in the way" of the store management process (Barriers to Progress 1986).

Unilever was one of the sponsors of the MARI proof of concept trial. We participated as we were well aware of the many current concerns surrounding PoP material, not least, from our point of view, improving execution when it finally reaches the store.

nOne of the pillars of our strategy is health and wellbeing. Another is ethics and environment.

Paul Sharpe has worked for Midlands Co-operative Society for 22 years and is manager of its Narborough Road store in Leicester.

In our second article on turning customers into 'fans', we look in more detail at how to establish where your staff are today in performance terms, in order to do an accurate 'gap analysis' on how far you have to go.

QWhy is it that I and my team dread the annual appraisals?

nDo you remember the ABC Card? This month's punter (a comfortably-off 40-something professional living in the South East) does. It wasn't as well-known as the Tesco Clubcard or Sainsbury's Rewards/Nectar schemes; or even, perhaps, as good. But it was a Safeway card. It was Bettabefor's card.

Running a flagship London store might be the pinnacle of your career, but as Sam Pelling admits, the challenges of an affluent customer base require a keen focus as well as an engaging manner. Luckily she has both in bucketfuls, which helped to ease her arrival at the Cromwell Road store in Kensington three months ago.

Gadgets are a bit like Marmite: you either love them or hate them.

Mark Twain, the celebrated author of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, once wrote that babies are "an inestimable blessing and bother". He's got a point. While bringing a new baby into the world can make the hardiest of men shed a tear, they don't tend to come with instructions.

We are surrounded by measures that - due to the twin pressures of oil and raw material price increases - encourage manufacturing industries to put their prices up.